We are in a golden era for buying and selling digital LPs. While I’ll use Bandcamp, sleek alternatives like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo are equally great options. These online markets inherently incentivize artists to avoid filler or risk losing a sale, while the subscription streaming model requires artists to pad their catalog for pay per play. Streaming has revived the worst trope of the old music industry: the album that is just “two hits and a bunch of crap.”
Spotify’s business model demands album filler because the platform pays out royalties based on “stream share” which trigger a payout the second a track hits the 30 second mark, incentivizing artists to maximize volume over value. This has fundamentally warped modern songwriting: albums are aggressively padded with short, two minute tracks and repetitive hooks designed specifically to feed the algorithm and inflate stream counts. On Spotify, a deep, cohesive artistic statement takes a back seat to sheer data output, turning what should be a focused LP into a bloated playlist of algorithmic bait.
Accidental hits happen way more often than you’d think. As it turns out, artists are notoriously bad at predicting their own success. When you buy a digital LP on a platform like Bandcamp, you are investing in a complete and curated piece of art where even the tracks the artist never expected to blow up exist naturally as part of a cohesive story. On subscription services like Spotify, those same happy accidents are treated like lottery tickets while surrounded by cynical, algorithm optimized filler designed just to farm streams. Buying the album ensures you are experiencing those unexpected gems as genuine creative discoveries, rather than digging through algorithmic bloat to find them.
Bandcamp serves the genre; streaming serves the algorithm. When producers target platforms like Spotify, artistic nuances like tempo variations and volume dynamics are sacrificed to strict LUFS loudness standards and predictable, club friendly danceability. This algorithmic pressure strips electronic and club music of its experimental edge, forcing tracks into a uniform, compressed sonic mold just to survive on a playlist. On Bandcamp, however, the music is freed from these rigid streaming constraints, allowing producers to prioritize raw genre authenticity and dynamic storytelling over sanitized, playlist ready optimization. Soundtrack and orchestral music have become major casualties of this shift, as their essential cinematic highs and quiet, emotional lows are flattened into a lifeless wall of sound just to meet streaming’s volume requirements.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not here to sell you my album. Go ahead and enjoy the whole thing ad free on my website. https://thejoyo.com/#more
This, the main thing I want from music software is an infinite stream of background music with a personalization algorithm to select new songs I’ll probably like. Most of the suggestions people are giving don’t really work as a substitute for that.
there’s a massive backlog of bandcamp radio sessions that I know you’ve never heard.
I looked at it, it’s a handful of channels representing broad genres, an hour or two in length, with commentary. That is not a substitute for a personalized music stream. It still wouldn’t be with a wider selection; I tried mixcloud for a while, it doesn’t work for me, there are no channels that give me just the music I want to hear in a wide enough variety, it’s too much work searching through them, I’d rather skip the commentary and not have to find something new every hour.
Not that I use spotify, what I ended up doing is writing my own script to scrape bandcamp and use its recommendation features to get associations between albums and assign probability weights to them for what to play next based on what I have liked and disliked. Aside from being buggy and against tos so probably can’t publish, I’m pretty happy with it. Algorithmic streaming is a much more convenient way of listening to and discovering music, and I don’t expect many people to switch away from it.
This sounds like the optimal solution. Would you mind sharing your script? If you don’t want to actually publish it, I wouldn’t mind a DM with the source code!
This is like something I’ve always wanted, but haven’t made. The Spotify algorithm is pretty good at the statistical comparisons of music, and I don’t know another service that does it.